


Shed Your Skin

by canonicallygay



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: First Kiss, Getting Together, Hurt Crowley (Good Omens), Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Post-Canon, Protective Aziraphale (Good Omens), Sickfic, Snake Crowley (Good Omens), Weird Biology, but not the sexy kind, kind of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-27
Updated: 2019-06-27
Packaged: 2020-05-20 16:48:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,289
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19380772
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/canonicallygay/pseuds/canonicallygay
Summary: Never mind that he’s spent the past six thousand years trying to cultivate a cool and unaffected appearance. It’s all to be undone in one afternoon by the Almighty’s cruel idea of a biological joke.





	Shed Your Skin

**Author's Note:**

> For this lovely prompt on the kinkmeme: https://tadfield-advertiser.dreamwidth.org/517.html?thread=75781#cmt75781

_It never used to be this bad,_ Crowley thinks miserably as he grinds his shoulder into the arm of his very expensive leather couch.

He doesn’t think the words, exactly. He’s too far gone to string together a coherent sentence. The last functional bit of his mind, though- the bit that hasn’t yet been absorbed into the dull buzz of pain- is wondering why, _why_ this is happening, and why now. He can only figure that the recent stress of the missing Antichrist and the Armageddon-That-Wasn’t, not to mention his and Aziraphale’s narrowly avoided total obliteration by holy water and hellfire respectively, has scrambled something very important inside him, because today he is peeling apart in dry and patchy pieces and there’s nothing he can do about it.

This is a particularly bad shed. He’s had many a moult before where the old skin slipped off like a glove in one huge and satisfying piece, but of course, he was a snake at the time, and that sort of thing comes quite naturally to snakes.

Today he’s a human shaped being.

He’s never shed his skin as a human shaped being before. Can a human shaped being even moult properly, without the shed getting stuck on all of the nooks and crannies and inconvenient edges that come with being human shaped? The answer so far is a resounding “no.”

And he’s not feeling quite himself, either- he’s somewhere between angel and demon and mortal and reptile and he can’t seem to go back to being any _one_ of those things, trapped in this flaky amalgamation for the foreseeable future. He doesn’t know what he is anymore or why this body has picked this particular moment to slough off its outermost layer but it doesn’t matter because

it  _fucking itches._  

The flat is a far cry from its usual spotless self. Little translucent scraps of shed skin litter the tile and cling to the furniture he’s been rubbing up against all afternoon. As for Crowley himself, the new skin he’s managed to expose is pink and raw and sensitive to the touch, and the rest of him is flaking off in every direction and itching to the point of agony. His fingernails are too blunt to be much help, as they’re still filed down neatly (and polished a shiny black) from a few days ago when Aziraphale had sweet-talked him into accompanying him to his biweekly manicure. Then there’s the biggest handicap of all: in addition to the eyelids of his human form, he’s got the ocular scales that are usually reserved for his snake body, only they’ve dried and gone cloudy and he can’t see a blessed thing.

Ideally, he would miracle it all away. But the reptilian part of him is pleading for him to turn up the humidity instead and scratch and rub and writhe on the ground until the screaming discomfort subsides.

Besides, he’s not feeling much up to miracles of any sort at the moment.

He’s been sprawled on the floor for some unspecified stretch of time, stripped down to his underwear. His vision is fogged to the point of uselessness and he can’t seem to rub the stuck scales from where they’ve dried to his eyeballs. He is burning with pain as he shudders against the cool tile, his mind whirling and racing and thinking of everything and nothing at all, his body begging him to move and to stay stock-still and _fuck fuck fuck he’s going insane._

So of course that’s when the doorbell gives a polite little buzz. And another. And another.

And there's really only one person it could be.

Never mind that he’s spent the past six thousand years trying to cultivate a cool and unaffected appearance. It’s all to be undone in one afternoon by the Almighty’s cruel idea of a biological joke. “’m here,” Crowley groans anyway, because even in his worst and most pathetic moments, he can’t bring himself to deny Aziraphale anything. “C’min.”

“I’ve been phoning you over and over again, Crowley,” comes the angel’s voice from down the hallway. Getting closer. He must have miracled the front door unlocked. “Don’t you have your…” Aziraphale trails off, the edge of irritation fading from his tone as he comes across what Crowley assumes must be a vile mess of shed skin all over the marble floor and the elegant furnishings and the _plants_ , even.

Crowley tucks his knees towards his chest, squeezes his useless cloudy eyes shut. Waits for the inevitable disgust.

“Oh, dearest,” Aziraphale says instead, in a voice so gentle that it’s just as excruciating. “What’s gotten you in such a state?” He crouches down next to Crowley, and Crowley feels fingers brushing ever so lightly across his cheek, presumably knocking away an errant scale that was still clinging to his face. The hand lingers there, soft and warm and sending shivers down the back of Crowley’s neck. He refuses to open his eyes.

The hand disappears. Footsteps signify that the angel has stepped away from him, and Crowley whimpers despite himself. But Aziraphale is back just as quickly, pressing a warm and wet washcloth against his eyelids. “Hush, love,” Aziraphale says, soothingly. ( _Love?_ Crowley wonders if the shed has affected his hearing as well, or perhaps his auditory processing abilities.) “You’ve always come to my rescue. Now let me care for you.”

The washcloth is swept back over his forehead, and with a few more light touches, the retained ocular scales have softened enough for careful hands to slide them out of his eyes. Crowley blinks rapidly as his apartment swims back into clarity, and Aziraphale with it. He looks more… _ethereal_ than usual, backlit like this as light spills in through the windows. The sun catches in his curls and lights them up like the fluffiest, whitest halo. 

Suddenly Crowley is struck by a flash of icy terror.

He scrabbles backwards across the floor, away from Aziraphale’s gentle hands and his too-soft looks. “You think you can help me?” he spits, as harshly as he can with the words rasping from his dry throat. “What does an angel want with a great bloody sssnake, anyway? You’ve known me from the sstart, haven’t you noticed the eyesss? The tongue? The fucking fangsss? Get _off me_ ,” he adds, when Aziraphale moves like he’s going to come closer again. And he punctuates the words by baring his teeth and hissing, an ugly sound that tears from the back of his maw.

Aziraphale doesn’t flinch. He doesn’t even blink. Worst of all, that soft expression that Crowley knows _must_ be pity doesn’t budge from his face. “I’ve always thought your eyes were beautiful, Crowley. Ever since the beginning.”

Crowley has no line of defense against these words. He’d never bothered to learn what to do with kindness, never had any reason to. His mouth clacks shut.

“Nngh,” he croaks out eventually; the best response he can come up with for the moment.

The angel is approaching again, and Crowley lets him this time, the fight having left him as quickly as it set on. Part of him wants to apologize for the outburst, but he’s also feeling an uncharacteristic urge to snap his teeth at Aziraphale until he relents and allows Crowley to suffer through this on his own. And then there’s the ever-present longing to bury his face in the crook of Aziraphale’s neck, where it’s surely warm and safe, and let himself be vulnerable for a change.

So he doesn’t do anything. Just watches warily as Aziraphale sits down on the floor next to him.

“Don’t just scratch at it like that,” Aziraphale admonishes, catching Crowley’s hand where it’s picking away at the scales on his shoulder in an anxious rhythm. He’s adopted the same inflection one might use to scold a pet dog that insists on biting at its stitches, and Crowley half expects Aziraphale to fasten one of those plastic cones around his neck.

But there’s no cone in sight. Just a warm hand holding his. “We should draw you a nice bath, so you can soak,” Aziraphale is saying. “Oh! And this will help. Here, give me your shoulders.” He draws a little plastic jar out of thin air, gestures for Crowley to turn around. With a few strokes of Aziraphale’s hands across his back, coconut oil is melting beautifully against his skin like butter on a particularly scaly piece of toast. And then, once the shed has softened and come away, Aziraphale takes his nails- elegantly manicured, of course, but just ever so slightly longer than Crowley’s- and scratches lightly across the fresh skin.

A little hiss escapes through Crowley’s teeth, involuntarily this time, and more out of pleasure than anything else. He glances back, still waiting for that inevitable flinch, but Aziraphale is gazing at him like he’s something precious, rather than a snake parading around in human’s clothing.

“Don’t you think it’s disgusting, at least?” Crowley asks him desperately, finding his voice at last. “Lumps of—of dead skin all over, and the peeling and… I mean, I’ve seen all sorts of depravity going on in Hell and even I think this is—”

“Crowley,” Aziraphale interrupts. “I don’t think you’re disgusting. I could never think you’re disgusting.”

Crowley follows the coconut oil’s lead and finally melts into Aziraphale’s hands, leaning back into the touch the way he’s wanted to for… millennia, probably. He thinks for a moment.

“A bath sounds alright,” Crowley says.

 

__

 

Aziraphale has climbed into the unoccupied half of Crowley’s bed on the understanding that he will _not_ be sleeping, only stretching out his legs, and maybe he’ll get some light reading done as well while Crowley naps, wouldn’t that be nice?

Crowley privately thinks it _does_ sound rather nice. There’s a picture in his head of Aziraphale curled up next to his own sleeping form, both of them tucked under the duvet, with Aziraphale holding a book and drinking occasionally from the mug of cocoa he’s left on the nightstand. He rolls his eyes instead of saying so.

He’s still thinking about earlier, when he hissed in Aziraphale’s face, but Aziraphale seems quite willing to let it go so Crowley tries to do the same. Next to him, Aziraphale snaps his fingers, and a glass of water materializes in his other hand. He passes it to Crowley.

“Thanks,” Crowley says, accepting the offering. His hands are greasy with a fresh coat of coconut oil and it almost slips out of his grip, but he manages to fumble it over to his nightstand before it spills all over the sheets.  

Aziraphale stifles a giggle, and Crowley fixes him with a glare that they both know isn’t serious. It seems things are mostly back to normal between them.

Mostly. 

“How did you know what to do? I mean, how to help?” Crowley asks.

“I had a pet lizard, once.”

Crowley waits for Aziraphale to elaborate. He doesn’t.

Something else occurs to Crowley as he reaches to sip from his water. “You’ve been performing miracles left and right today, haven’t you, angel?” he asks. He keeps his tone light, but his curiosity is real. The door, the oil, the bathwater that stayed the perfect temperature through nearly an hour of soaking… glasses of water and purposeful little touches that seemed to draw the stubborn itch from his body... it all felt out of character for an angel with a history of fretting over even the _threat_ of a reprimand. 

 “Well,” says Aziraphale, with a far-off look in his eyes as he considers it. “I don’t suppose Up There is about to set a ceiling on my miracle usage, not anymore. For all they know, the both of us are indestructible.” He smiles, undoubtedly remembering the fear on the faces of both Heaven and Hell as they looked upon something they did not understand.

“Besides,” he adds, glancing over to meet Crowley’s eyes. “What good are miracles if I can’t use them to help the one who’s dearest to me?”

He’s wearing that soft expression again. Perhaps it was never pity after all. But Crowley doesn’t want to get his hopes up.

Or… maybe he does? Because Aziraphale has moved closer to him. Aziraphale is inches away, so close to pressing skin to skin, and Crowley can feel the delicious warmth that emanates from him. Aziraphale is.... _oh_. Aziraphale is taking his hand under the covers, lacing their fingers together. Squeezing.

“Angel,” Crowley starts, and shifts a little to make proper eye contact. “Aziraphale…”

He chokes on the words. He wants to say it, he _does_. But he’s already been stripped of his dignity today. He doesn’t know if he can relinquish this last thing, not yet, not while he’s so raw. 

“It’s okay, Crowley,” Aziraphale tells him. Another squeeze of his hand. “I do too.”

And then Aziraphale dives in to catch Crowley’s lips with his own.

Crowley lets out a strangled, wounded little sound that seems in direct contrast to the pure joy that's blooming in his chest. He sags against Aziraphale in relief and lets himself finally seek the warmth he’s been craving. It’s waiting for him on Aziraphale’s lips; in the flick of his tongue; in the soft sighs he makes into Crowley’s mouth. Everywhere.

“ _Thank fucking Whoever_ ,” Crowley murmurs when Aziraphale pulls back. He’s the one to lean in for more, kissing his angel’s answering laugh away.

They don’t move from the bed for the rest of the evening, and neither of them get any sleep at all. And if it turns out that Crowley’s tongue is a little longer, and thinner, and ever so slightly more forked than expected, Aziraphale doesn’t say anything. 

 

**Author's Note:**

> This is the first thing I've written in YEARS that is not an academic paper so I'm hoping it's not The Worst™
> 
> Let me know if you'd like me to write more Good Omens! I have some ideas floating around...


End file.
